THE CHANGING GEOGRAPHY of THIRD CINEMA Michael Chanan
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From Screen Special Latin American Issue Volume 38 number 4 Winter 1997 THE CHANGING GEOGRAPHY OF THIRD CINEMA Michael Chanan IN 1968, after two years work, a group of film-makers in Argentina calling themselves Grupo Cine Liberación, radical in both politics and their approach to cinema, completed a mammoth three-part political film running almost four and a half hours entitled La hora de los hornos (Hour of the Furnaces). [1] Constrained by the conditions which followed the military coup of 1966, but bolstered by the growth of organised resistance, the film was shot semi-clandestinely in conjunction with cadres of the Peronist movement (the negative was smuggled out to Italy where the film was finished). In short, as the North American critic Robert Stam has put it, it was a film made ‘in the interstices of the system and against the system...independent in production, militant in politics, and experimental in language’. [2] Setting out with the intention of making a social documentary in the manner established in Argentina ten years earlier by Fernando Birri and the Documentary School of Santa Fe (of which one of the group, Gerardo Vallejo, had been a member), the project underwent an organic transformation as a result of the conditions in which it was made. In particular, its most famous trait - the ‘openness’ of its text - derived from the experience of the film makers in the organisation of political debates around the screening of films from Cuba or by film-makers like Joris Ivens: We realised that the most important thing was not the film and the information in it so much as the way this information was debated. One of the aims of such films is to provide the occasion for people to find themselves and speak of about their own problems. The projection becomes a place where people talk out and develop their awareness. We learnt the importance of this space: cinema here becomes humanly useful. [3] Accordingly the film was constructed in a highly idiosyncratic manner: prompted by intertitles posing questions like ‘Why did Perón fall without a struggle? Should he have armed the people?’, it was designed to be stopped in the projector to allow for discussion and debate - designed, in other words, to disrupt the normal passive relationship of the spectator to the screen. The end product amounts to a militant poetic epic tapestry, weaving together disparate styles and materials ranging from didacticism to operatic stylisation, direct filming to the techniques of advertising, and incoporating photographs, newsreel, testimonial footage and film clips - from avant-garde and mainstream, fiction and documentary. But the film-makers described it as a ‘film act’, rather than a film in the conventional sense (which indeed it wasn’t): ‘an unfinished work, open in order to incorporate dialogue and for the meeting of revolutionary wills’. [4 ] Stam has pointed out the paradox which resulted: where ‘openness’ in art is usually understood in terms of plurisignification, polysemy, a plurality of equally legitimate readings offered to the contemplation of the receiver, Hour of the Furnaces ‘is not open in this sense: its messages are stridently unequivocal’. [5] The openness of the film lies elsewhere: in the political relationship between the film and the viewer - at least, in the clandestine circumstances in which the film was necessarily viewed in Argentina itself in the years before 1973, when the Peronists won a resounding electoral victory, the political conditions of the country were transformed, and a version of the film was put on commercial release. Those clandestine audiences were not insignificant: with some fifty prints in circulation, the film makers estimated 100,000 viewers over the five years in which the film led its hidden life. [6] FOLLOWING the completion of the film, two members of the group, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, wrote a manifesto based on the experience entitled Hacia un tercer cine (Towards a Third Cinema). [7] Subtitled ‘Notes and Experiences on the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World’, there is a doubtless deliberate ambiguity in the term ‘Third Cinema’ which requires explication. The wordplay comes from the analogy with the term ‘third world’, meaning the underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. This term had its origins at the Bandung Conference of 1955, the founding conference of the Non-Aligned Movement, when China promulgated the theory of the three worlds. The first world consisted in the advanced capitalist countries of the West, including North America and Australasia; the second world comprised the Soviet Union and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe; the countries of the remaining continents were thus the third world, to which China declared its allegiance. [8] On the one hand, therefore, the term corresponds to what Solanas and Getino referred to as ‘a new historical situation’: ‘ten years of the Cuban Revolution, the Vietnamese struggle, and the development of a world- wide liberation movement whose moving force is to be found in the third world countries’. [9] On the other, third cinema is not restricted to the third world, even in the original conception of the idea, for in order to illustrate what they meant, they immediately cited examples which come from the first world, namely, ‘Newsreel, a US New Left film group, the cinegiornali of the Italian student movement, the films made by the Etats Généraux du Cinéma Français, and those of the British and Japanese student movements’. [10] A few paragraphs later, they add the experiments carried out by Chris Marker in France when he provided groups of workers with 8mm cameras and basic instruction in their use. The explanation of this apparent contradiction lies in their argument that the restitution of the real place and meaning of the most diverse phenomena, though experimental films which challenge orthodox representation and establish a new relation with the audience, is eminently subversive both in the neocolonial situation to be found in the countries of the third world, and in the consumer societies of the first world. They might have added, but they didn’t, in the second world too. In whichever world, ‘every image that documents, bears witness to, refutes or penetrates the truth of a situation is something more than a film image or purely artistic fact; it becomes something which the system finds indigestible’. [11] Notice that ‘experimental’ here means something a little different from its traditional use in the context of, say, underground or avant-garde film. The Argentinians suggest a position in which, to fulfill the criteria of third cinema, there can be nothing in political terms which is tentative or hypothetical about the content or signification of the images concerned; whereas the avant-garde or underground notion of experimentalism defends the notion of a space which is untouched by these considerations (without thereby becoming reactionary). The idea of third cinema, in which the camera is often equated, albeit somewhat rhetorically, to the gun, restores to the term avant-garde something of its original meaning, which as Baudelaire once remarked, was probably due to the French predilection for military metaphors. Geographical confusions dissolve when the two Argentinians explain what they mean by First and Second Cinema, which correspond not to the First and Second Worlds but constitute a virtual geography of their own. First Cinema is the model imposed by the American film industry, the Hollywood movie - whose domination is such that even the ‘monumental’ films, like Bondarchuk’s War and Peace (ussr, 1967), which had begun to appear in Second World countries, submit to the same propositions. Even when they only adopt the language of the American model, and not its themes, this still corresponds to an ideology which posits a particular relationship between film and spectator, where cinema is conceived as pure spectacle. This kind of film, made for exhibition in large theatres, with a standardised duration (feature-length or blockbuster) and hermetic forms that are born and die on the screen, is not only designed to satisfy the commercial interests of the production companies: it also leads to the absorption of forms which necessarily imply a bourgeois Weltanschauung inherited from the nineteenth century, in which the capacity of the subject to participate in making history is denied to all except the heroic and exceptional individual, and history is present only as an external force and an object of contemplation. Moreover, American cinema not only imposes its models of form and language, but also industrial, commercial and technical structures which include the festivals, magazines and even film schools which perpetuate its values. Here the Argentinians speak from their own perspective as third world film-makers. This institutional structure, they explain, guarantees the hegemony of the films made by the imperialist countries, because the film industries of dependent countries like Argentina are too flimsy and underfinanced to compete effectively, even in their own markets. The first serious alternative to arise in these countries was the kind of film subsequently known as auteur cinema, art cinema or, in a later phase, new wave cinema. However, although the comparison suggests itself immediately, Solanas and Getino refrain from identifying the model for this Second Cinema as European, which would be inaccurate both historically and conceptually; I shall come back to this below. This alternative, they say, represented an evident advance in terms of the freedom of film- makers in a country like Argentina to express themselves outside the standardised form and language of the regular commercial movie, with the consequence that the directors involved - they mention Del Carril, Torre Nillson, Ayala, Feldman, Murua, Kohon, Khun, Birri - constituted at a certain moment the vanguard of Argentinian cinema.